Wireless telecommunication networks are increasingly using wireless location technologies to determine the locations of mobile stations they serve. As a result, there is an increasing interest in developing location-based services and applications, i.e., applications that make use of mobile station location information. These location-based applications may simply track or monitor the locations of mobile stations, or they may provide information or services to mobile stations based on their locations. Such location-based applications may be internal to the wireless telecommunication network, or they may be third-party applications that obtain the locations of mobile stations from a location server or other entity in the wireless telecommunication network. The Location Inter-operability Forum (LIF) has developed the “Mobile Location Protocol Specification” (version 3.0.0 published on Jun. 6, 2002), which defines one access method that allows applications to obtain mobile station location information from a wireless network.
In the existing art, in order to determine that a mobile station is positioned at a designated location, an entity of a wireless network will periodically determine the mobile station's location, until the mobile station's location matches the designated location. For example, the wireless network may poll a mobile station every ten minutes to determine if the mobile station is located at designated locations. The process of periodically determining a mobile station's location, however, can be inefficient, particularly if the mobile station is currently located far away from the designated location. Moreover, periodically polling to determine the mobile station's location exhausts network resources, considering that the network may perform the polling function for many mobile stations at once.